Justin Kan Launches Exec For Real-Time Mobile Jobs

Kan was known as the guy who popped up around Silicon Valley with a camera on his hat, live-streaming his life online for all to see. Kan turned that idea into Justin.TV, a Y Combinator-backed startup that became a popular online live video website.The company also spawned two others, Socialcam, a mobile video app, and Twitch.TV, a gaming video site. Meanwhile, Kan, now more experienced after learning how to build his startup on the fly, is an advisor to startups and a part-time venture partner at Y Combinator.

Now he's started a new company called Exec with cofounders Daniel Kan, Kan's brother and former head of sales and business development at UserVoice, and Amir Ghazvinian, a Stanford Masters in Bioinformatics graduate. The Y Combinator-backed company (more on that below) is a mobile app and website designed for people to find others to complete jobs for them in real-time.

Sound like other services like Zaarly, TaskRabbit? Exec is different, Kan says, because all the tasks are designed to be done in real-time. The jobs could be anything from the mundane: buying and delivering coffee; to the practical: buying, assembling and delivering Ikea furniture; to the bizarre: getting gas for a scooter that ran out of gas and driving it to the owner's office (true story). One person requested the planning of Valentine's Day with dinner, flowers and chocolate.

Exec dispatches the job requests to individuals who are nearby, have good ratings and skills in that area. Jobs are designed to pay at least a $25 hourly rate. The requests are sent automatically to the top person on the list, who has a couple of minutes to reply. If he or she doesn't say yes, Exec goes down the line to the next person. The ideas is to find someone really quickly, in the way that car service Uber finds a nearby car quickly. To be able to do jobs on Exec, people have to complete three rounds of interviews, so that they can be trusted, Kan says. While jobs are posted in real-time, people can also schedule task requests ahead of time.

The service has been in beta for about a month in San Francisco. Kan hopes that Exec can provide flexible work for people who are freelancers, writers, designers or just unemployed. "Our goal is to provide flexible work for someone who wants to make extra cash for a few hours per day, or even all day," Kan says.

Exec, which has a four-person team, is in the current crop of Y Combinator companies that will be pitching to investors in March. Kan, however, is also a Y Combinator "part time partner," helping existing new startups. So Paul Graham, cofounder of YC, jokingly tells Kan to "do office hours for yourself" for his startup.

Kan didn't necessarily need to go through Y Combinator again. He has some knowledge of how to run a startup and could probably tap other startups for help. But he says he likes building a company as part of the incubator. "I think it's such a great environment for founders," Kan says. "I want my cofounders to go through it. Also there's an immense focus with three months working on a product and not being distracted... And there's nothing more fun than working with other startups."

Now that he's got some more experience, Kan says he's taken one lesson, by just focusing on the things that are really important for the company and deferring decisions on everything else. This enables the company to move faster. With Justin.TV Kan and his team generally figured things out as they went along. He remembers an hours-long Justin.TV argument about whether to include "time stamps" in the chat window. To simplify things, Exec has one person in charge of each part of the company and that person is in charge of just building it. One person is on the iPhone app, another is in charge of operations and Kan developed the back-end technology. This time Kan is trying to be more pragmatic and building as few features for the service as possible and trying to make each one great for customers' experiences. "Our focus is customer experience. That's it. Everything else is secondary."